Category Archives: Chinese

Chinese, Poultry

Turkey Jook

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I hope you save that turkey carcass from Thanksgiving dinner, because you can use it to make turkey jook (“rice congee”, porridge… ahhh, just call it “jook“). And because I’m making it, you know the recipe has to be easy!

Turkey Jook

turkey jook

Originally posted 1 Dec 2008
Updated 25 Nov 2010

The Thanksgiving feast is done. Much of the remaining turkey meat has been cut off the carcass and saved for making sandwiches later. Now you’ve got a bare carcass sitting on your counter. You’re not going to throw that away are you?

Oh, heck no!

One of the best ways to deal with the turkey carcass is to make a big pot of turkey jook the next day. Making turkey jook takes relatively little work, especially compared to the culinary acrobatics that normally take place in the kitchen on Thanksgiving. Here’s what you do:

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Chinese, Egg, Tofu

Homemade Steamed Egg Tofu

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A super-simple, savory steamed dish that you can whip up in a snap.

homemade egg tofu copyright house of annie

Remember a while back I blogged about how egg tofu was just such an amazing thing and if you could find it at your Asian grocery store you should nab yourself at least 4 tubes? I even shared a very simple recipe on how you could cook it. Well, after eating loads of that stuff these days (over here, it’s very easy to find and I cook it at least once every two weeks), I found that we could make this simple tofu ourselves. So for those of you out there without access to an Asian grocery store (or if your store just doesn’t carry these things), you can TOTALLY make it yourself.

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Asian, Bakes, Chinese

Pandan Spiral Moon Cake Recipe

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(Update: If you’re looking for the Traditional Baked Mooncake Recipe, click here.)

Just in time for the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, a special moon cake recipe that will make your head spin.

baked spiral pastries plated

I have a friend here in Kuching who loves to garden. And since she lives next to an empty plot of land, she has put it to good use by cultivating it. When she mentioned that she grew purple sweet potatoes, I was hopeful that they were Okinawan sweet potatoes. I had to ask her if I could come by her house to help her harvest some.

Turns out she got really busy the weekend that we were going but she did dig up some to give to me. The ones she gave me were purple mixed with white and they were dry in texture. In some ways they reminded me of taro (yams) but a little sweeter. And later I found out that they were known as taro sweet potatoes. Well…that explains it…

Despite their dryness (or maybe because of it), I had the idea that I would boil them, mash them and then add some butter, milk and sugar and make them into a paste and use them as a filling for this pastry. After all, during the Mooncake festival, we find Shanghai mooncakes  filled with taro which are very similar in size and shape to these pastries.

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